In the exhibition Settlers Anastasia Ax occupies the rooms of the Academy of Fine Arts with plaster and concrete to build a place where investigation, negotiation and transformation are allowed to take place during the exhibition period.

Ax frequently works with standardized formats and materials intended for different types of industries or constructions, from which she constructs concrete conditions to interact with in her emotionally charged performance works. Circular processes that enable the reuse of materials and also the linking of new and old work are significant to Ax's artistry. The material used in Settlers is partly something that has been discarded by the producer, what cannot be returned at the end of the exhibition is given new life in Ax ateljé. The red iron oxide that runs through the installation is also visible in Breaking surface, Ax permanent installation at Väpnarplan in Stockholm.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, Ax chooses to build architectural structures of lightweight concrete blocks that will act as a framework for the exhibition. The structures are unfinished but still bring to mind planned buildings. In Settlers These constructions and their surrounding landscapes are like remnants of dreams or memories; narrative but functionally illogical. They exist as abstract symbols of something planned and controlled.

Among towering structures are sand dunes of crushed concrete and molded rounded shapes whose resemblance to skulls or eggs calls for care and protection, also parts of a symbolic hierarchy that can represent both an emotional and a societal system.

During the course of the exhibition, Ax will revisit the site to map its meaning through exploratory interventions and thereby sort it into a new intuitively decided order. A metaphorical reworking of the governing mechanisms that exist within and outside of us. The exhibition concludes with a performance in which the prevailing conditions are processed.